AMD ships Llano, the ultimate HTPC processor

At long last, AMD's first "real" Fusion CPU/GPU combo is shipping to OEMs.

It has been five years since the AMD/ATI merger promised us the "Fusion" of a CPU and GPU onto a single die, and on Monday AMD finally made good on that promise with the shipping of the company's first true multicore CPU/GPU combo parts, codenamed "Llano." Sure, the Brazos platform launch was technically the first time that AMD put a CPU and GPU onto the same die, but Llano is supposed to be what the company originally intended with Fusion—a combination of CPU cores and vector hardware that's somehow more "integrated" than a normal on-die GPU. (The exact way in which the latter is true is not clear to me; if anyone knows, feel free to enlighten.)

The picture above is from AMD's blog post announcing that Llano is shipping to OEMs, and it shows the workers in the company's Singapore factory surrounding a box that presumably contains one of the first batches of Llano processors.

AMD is calling Llano's combination of a CPU and GPU on the same die an APU, for "accelerated processing unit." Whatever you call it, it's pretty certain that even tech-savvy customers are never going to see Llano as anything other than another CPU/GPU combo part like Brazos and Sandy Bridge. No matter, though—the Llano parts will have their own place in the processor ecosystem, and it will be different from that of Sandy Bridge.

There is no chance that Llano's CPU core will outperform that of Sandy Bridge, given that the former is a straight-up derivative of AMD's existing Phenom II core. But Llano's GPU is another matter entirely. AMD has used their considerable experience in building best-in-class integrated graphics processors (IGPs) to pack a ton of GPU performance onto each Llano die. Llano will be a great gaming portable, and Llano desktops should offer extremely good price/performance ratios for gamers.

If Intel can get the performance of Sandy Bridge's trailing-edge GPU design up to the point where it can outperform low-end discrete graphics cards, then Llano should do even better. Llano's DirectX11-class GPU will beat Sandy Bridge's GPU by a comfortable margin, and should compete with mid-range discrete solutions. Intel won't have anything comparable until its Ivy Bridge launch early next year.

So from now until Ivy Bridge comes up, AMD will have the budget performance notebook and desktop segment pretty much to itself with Llano. Llano will also make a monster of a home theater PC chip, because you'll be able to build a relatively cheap HTPC with some serious gaming chops.

AMD has said that the first Llano parts will show up in laptops, with desktop parts likely to follow later in the summer. The company isn't giving out any details on which specific products are shipping, though—we'll probably get this info as part of an official launch, soon.

Llano desktops should offer extremely good price/performance ratios for gamers

But this?

"beat Sandy Bridge's GPU by a comfortable margin" won't be that hard, and "should compete with mid-range discrete solutions" doesn't sound like a great endorsement. If you want enthusiast performance, it sounds like you'll still need a discrete GPU (or two) - so why (in the desktop performance segment) would you go with Llano instead of a discrete CPU that's not only more powerful but separately upgradeable? Is there going to be some kind of Frankenchip multicore Llano Crossfire going on? Games are generally not CPU-bound these days - "serious gaming chops" means video hardware and fans crammed into a box with a good-enough CPU.

FWIW, I don't think the motherboard in my gaming box came with on-board graphics - because a board with 2+ x16 PCIe slots isn't going to be used for integrated-graphics applications. I'm not sure why Llano is much different from that situation (unless its graphics performance can be extended additively on a multi-core die. If that's true forget all this).

I can definitely see a part like this rocking out in laptops and HTPCs - but a dedicated gaming desktop, I'm not seeing the advantage yet over the typical setup.

"beat Sandy Bridge's GPU by a comfortable margin" won't be that hard, and "should compete with mid-range discrete solutions" doesn't sound like a great endorsement. If you want enthusiast performance, it sounds like you'll still need a discrete GPU (or two) - so why (in the desktop performance segment) would you go with Llano instead of a discrete CPU that's not only more powerful but separately upgradeable? Is there going to be some kind of Frankenchip multicore Llano Crossfire going on? Games are generally not CPU-bound these days - "serious gaming chops" means video hardware and fans crammed into a box with a good-enough CPU.

FWIW, I don't think the motherboard in my gaming box came with on-board graphics - because a board with 2+ x16 PCIe slots isn't going to be used for integrated-graphics applications. I'm not sure why Llano is much different from that situation (unless its graphics performance can be extended additively on a multi-core die. If that's true forget all this).

I can definitely see a part like this rocking out in laptops and HTPCs - but a dedicated gaming desktop, I'm not seeing the advantage yet over the typical setup.

You'll definitely need a discrete graphics card for any level of modern gaming at decent resolutions and framerates. Don't expect Llano was ever intended to replace that need - AMD will still have their graphics department in full swing.

I remember hearing that APUs (CPU + GPU) may very well be able to do some type of Crossfire with an additional AMD discrete card. So, buying a Llano machine and a discrete card wouldn't give you a net loss of the on-board graphics hardware. At a minimum it might at least give you an additional monitor port without issue. Or, it could be a great way to help throttle the energy use of a discrete card - just like how hybrid graphics work on laptops (NVIDIA Optimus?).

"beat Sandy Bridge's GPU by a comfortable margin" won't be that hard, and "should compete with mid-range discrete solutions" doesn't sound like a great endorsement. If you want enthusiast performance, it sounds like you'll still need a discrete GPU (or two) - so why (in the desktop performance segment) would you go with Llano instead of a discrete CPU that's not only more powerful but separately upgradeable? Is there going to be some kind of Frankenchip multicore Llano Crossfire going on? Games are generally not CPU-bound these days - "serious gaming chops" means video hardware and fans crammed into a box with a good-enough CPU.

If you need two GPU's, I wouldn't put you in the average gamer category. Take a look at the steam stats - http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/ - a lot are midrange cards or cards a few generations old, and most games are playable without having the latest and greatest in GPU's. If a $200 CPU covers both CPU/GPU duties, that makes for an incredibly cheap gaming rig? And why does CPU upgradability matter, you said yourself that games aren't CPU bound anymore, so if you really want to upgrade the GPU just drop one into a PCI-E slot.

Quote:

FWIW, I don't think the motherboard in my gaming box came with on-board graphics - because a board with 2+ x16 PCIe slots isn't going to be used for integrated-graphics applications. I'm not sure why Llano is much different from that situation (unless its graphics performance can be extended additively on a multi-core die. If that's true forget all this).

I can definitely see a part like this rocking out in laptops and HTPCs - but a dedicated gaming desktop, I'm not seeing the advantage yet over the typical setup.

It's probably so cheap that it doesn't matter, thus why cheaper boards often have on board GPU's, on the off chance you'll use it.

Funny how pc gamers only plays crysis for all those years:P " can it play crysis? "

/facepalm

I won't bother explaining the joke, since someone who registers an account apparently just to troll might still find it going over their heads. But please, continue with whatever you were going to do with your foot that far into your mouth.

Llano sounds interesting, it will be interesting to see what price points it will fall into, and just how well the GPU components work out. I suppose even if it only manages to do HD video without issue it could still have a place at a low enough price point. It would be nice to see some power use figures too. I'm not sure I'm sold on it as a gaming component, though. Even with many gamers still running older hardware, they frequently still want to upgrade to something other than an IGP solution when they do finally upgrade. Llano will have to prove to truly rival mid range cards at above simply very low resolutions to have a chance at making the low end gaming PC market, I think; if nothing else there's a lot of stigma to overcome.

"beat Sandy Bridge's GPU by a comfortable margin" won't be that hard, and "should compete with mid-range discrete solutions" doesn't sound like a great endorsement. If you want enthusiast performance, it sounds like you'll still need a discrete GPU (or two) - so why (in the desktop performance segment) would you go with Llano instead of a discrete CPU that's not only more powerful but separately upgradeable? Is there going to be some kind of Frankenchip multicore Llano Crossfire going on? Games are generally not CPU-bound these days - "serious gaming chops" means video hardware and fans crammed into a box with a good-enough CPU.

FWIW, I don't think the motherboard in my gaming box came with on-board graphics - because a board with 2+ x16 PCIe slots isn't going to be used for integrated-graphics applications. I'm not sure why Llano is much different from that situation (unless its graphics performance can be extended additively on a multi-core die. If that's true forget all this).

I can definitely see a part like this rocking out in laptops and HTPCs - but a dedicated gaming desktop, I'm not seeing the advantage yet over the typical setup.

You'll definitely need a discrete graphics card for any level of modern gaming at decent resolutions and framerates. Don't expect Llano was ever intended to replace that need - AMD will still have their graphics department in full swing.

I remember hearing that APUs (CPU + GPU) may very well be able to do some type of Crossfire with an additional AMD discrete card. So, buying a Llano machine and a discrete card wouldn't give you a net loss of the on-board graphics hardware. At a minimum it might at least give you an additional monitor port without issue. Or, it could be a great way to help throttle the energy use of a discrete card - just like how hybrid graphics work on laptops (NVIDIA Optimus?).

You know, there's more to gaming, even on a PC, than just the most cutting edge graphics. If you look on Steam any given day there are hundreds of titles that will run on any old laptop. Call them casual games or whatever you want, but a lot of them are still fun. Besides that, most of the games that come out even today are made to also be able to run on the consoles, which are at least 5 year old hardware. You don't need that powerful a PC to run modern games if you don't mind turning down some of the graphics settings. And also, don't forget Blizzard. They always make their games easy to run on all sorts of machines, and Llano will be more than adequate for WOW, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3 (assuming they decide to release it someday, heh).

"beat Sandy Bridge's GPU by a comfortable margin" won't be that hard, and "should compete with mid-range discrete solutions" doesn't sound like a great endorsement. If you want enthusiast performance, it sounds like you'll still need a discrete GPU (or two) - so why (in the desktop performance segment) would you go with Llano instead of a discrete CPU that's not only more powerful but separately upgradeable? Is there going to be some kind of Frankenchip multicore Llano Crossfire going on? Games are generally not CPU-bound these days - "serious gaming chops" means video hardware and fans crammed into a box with a good-enough CPU.

FWIW, I don't think the motherboard in my gaming box came with on-board graphics - because a board with 2+ x16 PCIe slots isn't going to be used for integrated-graphics applications. I'm not sure why Llano is much different from that situation (unless its graphics performance can be extended additively on a multi-core die. If that's true forget all this).

I can definitely see a part like this rocking out in laptops and HTPCs - but a dedicated gaming desktop, I'm not seeing the advantage yet over the typical setup.

You'll definitely need a discrete graphics card for any level of modern gaming at decent resolutions and framerates. Don't expect Llano was ever intended to replace that need - AMD will still have their graphics department in full swing.

I remember hearing that APUs (CPU + GPU) may very well be able to do some type of Crossfire with an additional AMD discrete card. So, buying a Llano machine and a discrete card wouldn't give you a net loss of the on-board graphics hardware. At a minimum it might at least give you an additional monitor port without issue. Or, it could be a great way to help throttle the energy use of a discrete card - just like how hybrid graphics work on laptops (NVIDIA Optimus?).

You know, there's more to gaming, even on a PC, than just the most cutting edge graphics. If you look on Steam any given day there are hundreds of titles that will run on any old laptop. Call them casual games or whatever you want, but a lot of them are still fun. Besides that, most of the games that come out even today are made to also be able to run on the consoles, which are at least 5 year old hardware. You don't need that powerful a PC to run modern games if you don't mind turning down some of the graphics settings. And also, don't forget Blizzard. They always make their games easy to run on all sorts of machines, and Llano will be more than adequate for WOW, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3 (assuming they decide to release it someday, heh).

Well certainly - that's why I said modern gaming at decent resolutions and framerates. If you're expecting to the latest FPS at 1080p @ 60Hz with full graphics (what I meant by modern).... Llano isn't for you. Everything else you mention I agree is great for Llano (maybe not Diablo 3 though).

I am surprised that there's not a single benchmark out there on these chips. How long will it take for Anand to review one???

Given Anand's hard-on for AMD, my guess is not too long.

HTPCs have too many roadblocks due to the clusterfark of an excuse we have for IP and copyright law. As it is, my DishNetwork DVR does everything I want pretty well except for making it easy to seamlessly at extra storage on the fly (there is a means to upgrade via a USB hard drive, but you have to pay to activate the feature, which I feel is a bit of a rip off, and even then you have to move shows between the in-box drive and the external drive, the DVR isn't smart enough to pool them both into one big chunk of storage). It would be neat to have one box that could handle all of my DVR duties, plus give me Hulu and Netflix access, as well as be able to show webpages on the TV, etc, but while HTPCs are great at the latter part of all that, they still can't compete with the cable/satellite service boxes for the big function of recording programs from any channel I want and being able to search and find programs without knowing what channel they are on or when they are coming on.

As it is, I'm stuck with a three device solution where I have my Dish DVR to record shows, my PS3 to do Netflix, web browsing, and serving media files from my PC hard drive, and my PC to watch Hulu because the people behind Hulu are such inbred idiots that they block access from the PS3 web browser.

HTPCs have too many roadblocks due to the clusterfark of an excuse we have for IP and copyright law. As it is, my DishNetwork DVR does everything I want pretty well except for making it easy to seamlessly at extra storage on the fly (there is a means to upgrade via a USB hard drive, but you have to pay to activate the feature, which I feel is a bit of a rip off, and even then you have to move shows between the in-box drive and the external drive, the DVR isn't smart enough to pool them both into one big chunk of storage).

If you want enthusiast performance, it sounds like you'll still need a discrete GPU (or two)

Shocking though it may be, most gamers don't need "enthusiast performance." Most games will work just fine on a low-to-mid-grade card.

How bout not snarking at me for taking the article up on one of its premises? I'm not the one perpetuating the 1000fps fanboy stereotype here. Just point out that no, a low-to-mid-grade card will not "work just fine" for most games that "gamers" are playing. That'll be even more true when Llano finally makes it to desktop chips months and months from now.

Alfonse wrote:

Quote:

"serious gaming chops" means video hardware and fans crammed into a box with a good-enough CPU.

No, what you're describing is, "I have too much money" or "I have 3 monitors with a combined resolution of 8 Megapixels."

No, what Stokes is describing (the quoted matter is his, not mine) by "serious gaming chops" is, say, about what Brian Won would stick in the Hot Rod. Here's a link, I'll wait for you to go check.

See that $250 video card? That's not "I have too much money" blah blah blah, that's "I want to run Bad Company 2 at 1920x1080 with an acceptable framerate, decent texture quality and at least a little AA/AF"

"beat Sandy Bridge's GPU by a comfortable margin" won't be that hard, and "should compete with mid-range discrete solutions" doesn't sound like a great endorsement. If you want enthusiast performance, it sounds like you'll still need a discrete GPU (or two) - so why (in the desktop performance segment) would you go with Llano instead of a discrete CPU that's not only more powerful but separately upgradeable? Is there going to be some kind of Frankenchip multicore Llano Crossfire going on? Games are generally not CPU-bound these days - "serious gaming chops" means video hardware and fans crammed into a box with a good-enough CPU.

If you need two GPU's, I wouldn't put you in the average gamer category. Take a look at the steam stats - http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/ - a lot are midrange cards or cards a few generations old, and most games are playable without having the latest and greatest in GPU's. If a $200 CPU covers both CPU/GPU duties, that makes for an incredibly cheap gaming rig? And why does CPU upgradability matter, you said yourself that games aren't CPU bound anymore, so if you really want to upgrade the GPU just drop one into a PCI-E slot.

This is pretty much proof that the 'typical gamer' is not the same 'gamer' posting on forums like this. By far the most popular card on that list is the Radeon HD5570, I just picked up three of those for HyperV/RemoteFX testing for $89 each on Newegg. Most gamers do not buy $200-600 video cards. Most gamers are perfectly happy with Xbox level graphics. Consequently, for most gamers, Llano is going to look like a total steal.

Whether it takes off or not will depend upon whether or not AMD prices it right, produces it in quantity, and markets it well. Like most products. The technology combo, however, is killer on its face.

This is pretty exciting. I've been in the market for like a $300-$400 notebook for PC games. I mean, CPU's were fast enough when the first dual-cores started shipping, so for maybe 5 years now the main bottleneck has been the GPU part.

As a programmer, I am very excited about Llano (and the rest of the APUs coming out of AMD this and the next year). The reason is simple: all that untamed power which has traditionally been hidden behind an expensive-for-data-transfers bus, will now suddenly sit right next to the CPU and communicate with it with a very low-latency / high-bandwidth connection (or possibly a shared cache). This is important because, for a large class of problems, processing them on the GPU has always been a no-go because the benefit of increased computation speeds did not outweigh the cost of transferring the data back and forth. Well, this tradeoff is going away now. Expect a lot of awesomeness to come out of it. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that this aspect of up-and-coming architectures will become so quintessential, that in a few years not having a GPU on-die will seem as absurd as not having an FPU on-die seems today.

And dammit, I don't need one of those, but I want one! I want to explore all this exciting new computation space! Too bad that the systems that Llano will mostly end up in don't make much sense for me. So the most likely outcome is that I'll be replacing my aging ultraportable laptop with a Brazos-based one this year (ideally the ThinkPad X120e), followed by a “Trinity” desktop processor next year (Llano's successor based on Bulldozer).

Having *good enough* gaming performance in a cheap laptop (which is generally low-res anyway) is a major win. The Sandy Bridge comparison videos on YouTube are very impressive. Let's see how they price these things. Also, what is the marketing name for these CPUs? Is it Fusion?

Also, while this is a great solution for tablets and low end laptops, if I was building an HTPC I would still use a discrete video card. For the extra $30 you get better performance and a part that can be changed out if it fails.

This could potentially dominate the laptop market. Delivering low power 15 inch or smaller notebooks with enough power to actually pull out some decent performance and battery life without costing close to a grand.

HTPC we could be looking at some super silent solutions. I hope it doesn't have any issues like the i3s do.

Also, while this is a great solution for tablets and low end laptops, if I was building an HTPC I would still use a discrete video card. For the extra $30 you get better performance and a part that can be changed out if it fails.

my .02

Curious - what better performance out of a discrete card do you need for an HTPC? Or, do you plan to game on your HTPC as well?

For the failure rate, I'd think getting rid of a video card would decrease the likelyhood of hardware failure. The entire graphics card (board/fan/components/silicon/connectors) is gone (or moved to the CPU).

I am surprised that there's not a single benchmark out there on these chips. How long will it take for Anand to review one???

Given Anand's hard-on for AMD, my guess is not too long.

HTPCs have too many roadblocks due to the clusterfark of an excuse we have for IP and copyright law.

HTPCs maybe, but the dedicated processors in streaming devices, not so much. Considering the fact that Netflix and other pay services can exist on the PC means that a smaller version could succeed as well. Also we could end up with a GoogleTV v2. Either way we need something better for the low end than just Atom or Tegra.

Well certainly - that's why I said modern gaming at decent resolutions and framerates. If you're expecting to the latest FPS at 1080p @ 60Hz with full graphics (what I meant by modern).... Llano isn't for you. Everything else you mention I agree is great for Llano (maybe not Diablo 3 though).

Well, obviously your definition of decent resolutions and framerates is a bit more demanding than the average gamer, otherwise no one would put up with the consoles, which certainly don't have the horsepower to run games at 1080p @ 60Hz with full graphics.